Tag Archives: BBC Radio Solent

Liisa Rohumaa shares her fears for the Royal baby’s privacy on BBC Radio Solent

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By Dean Eastmond

Bournemouth University’s Liisa Rohumaa, a Lecturer in Online Journalism, featured on BBC Radio Solent talking about the arrival of the Royal baby.

Liisa explained how the newly born Royal baby will not have the same privileges with privacy that his father once did.

“If you think of the two big scandalous royal stories of recent years involving Harry and Katherine, one in Las Vegas and the other one showing pictures of Katherine semi-nude.”, she added. “Both of those stories didn’t actually emerge from mainstream media; one was a foreign press agency via a magazine and the other was social media.”

Liisa explained that the lack of privacy the royal family may get will most likely be down to factors such as social media instead of the traditional, almost archaic ways with mainstream print media.

Amateur photography taken on phones and then uploaded onto social media websites (such as Twitter or Facebook) will be the main privacy issues with the family.

Liisa explains that the royal media managers will have “a really tricky situation”.

“The first few weeks will be at the Middletons’ in their house. William and Katherine are keen to have some family time together and that will be the very first test of the embargo on pictures or information coming out or photographers hiding in bushes and all of those sorts of horrible things that people think about when they think about paparazzi.”

Dean is a student at Budmouth College in Weymouth, who is working at Bournemouth University in the Press and PR Department. He joined BU on a Sir Samuel Mico Scholarship, which provides 10 students from his college with essential work experience for four weeks over the summer.

Dr Kate Murphy talks about suffragette on BBC Radio Solent

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On the centenary of suffragette Emily Wilding Davison being knocked down by the King’s horse at the Epsom Derby, BU’s Dr Kate Murphy spoke about the impact of the event on BBC Radio Solent.

Kate lectures in Radio Production and curated an exhibition in women’s history at the Women’s Library which included some of Emily Wilding Davison possessions, such as her prison diaries.

She told Drivetime presenter Steve Harris that the act had a profound effect on getting women the right to vote.

“I think the suffragettes were so iconic and important and they really did progress and start that whole movement going.

“Emily Wilding Davison was force fed 49 times and she was an incredibly brave and heroic woman I think and she died for the cause of the vote, which is quite extraordinary to think about.”

She added, however, that she did not believe that Emily intended to throw herself under the King’s horse – ultimately dying of her injuries – but that she meant to attach a protest scarf to it.

“There was a thought that she might be pinning something on the King’s Horse or the bridle, and they think now that it was a Votes for Women scarf she was going to attach, so when the horse went over the finish line it would have the sash on it, which would have been a very profound statement to have made.”

She added that there were not many more higher profile events than the Epsom at that time.

“To petition the King in that way would have been a very profound act on her behalf,” Kate said.

“But she’d done some very brave acts already – she’d been arrested many, many times, been to prison many times.”

Kate also explained that at the time of the incident 100 years ago opinion was divided on women getting the vote, and that she still didn’t think women had true equality in Parliament.

“It was a very, very contentious issue but it was the right thing – although it did take until 1928 for women to get the full vote, and even now there’s great inequality in the Houses of Parliament with MPs, so there’s still a long way to go before there’s that full political equality.”

Kate also appeared on BBC Radio Solent on Sunday morning – 100 years to the day that Emily Wilding Davison died.

Listen to the full interview

Rufus Stone featured on BBC Radio Solent

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Rufus Stone, a film based on research conducted by BU’s Dr Kip Jones, was featured on Julian Clegg’s BBC Radio Solent Breakfast Show.

The research project looked at homosexuality and ageing in rural communities and Dr Kip Jones, Reader in Qualitative Research at BU, spoke to Julian about the project and explained its importance and discussed why the findings were turned into a film.

Kip said about the making of the film, “It took about six years [to make the film], it was a large project of research all over the country. There were three years of gathering research of older lesbian and gay men’s stories who lived mainly in rural areas in the south of England and Wales.”

Continuing the conversation to talk about how it is being used to train and teach communities, Kip said, “We recently held a two day ‘train the trainers’ event where we brought together local councils and service providers and community organisers from all over the country and we worked with them, showing them the film and showing how they can lead discussion groups afterwards.”

Talking on future showings of the film, Kip said, “Bournemouth University is having its Festival of Learning in June and Rufus Stone has two showings, in Poole and Wareham.”

The interview ended with Julian and Kip discussing whether the culture in these rural communities has changed and whether this film represents current rural culture.

You can listen to the interview again for the next seven days on the BBC website.

For more information about Bournemouth University’s Festival of Learning, including the showing of Rufus Stone, on the Festival of Learning website.

Dr Max Lowenstein talks about high profile sentencing case on BBC Radio Solent

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Dr Max Lowenstein, a Lecturer in Law at BU, was interviewed on BBC Radio Solent’s drivetime programme about high profile sentencing cases taking place that day.

Mick and Mairead Philpott had been sentenced for the manslaughter of their six children in a house fire, alongside friend Paul Mosley, earlier that day.

Mick Philpott received a life sentence, but could be released after 15 years, while Mairead and Mosley could be released after serving half of their 17 year prison term.

Presenter Steve Harris said that many listeners believed that it was not a long enough sentence but Dr Lowenstein explained that judge’s hands could sometimes be tied by the law in terms of the punishment they could hand out.

“What would be interesting is what sort of emotions the judge is picking up on and what sort of perspectives the judge is picking up on, because we have the offender, the victim and the public,” said Dr Lowenstein, who specialises in criminal law and sentencing.

“Within the remarks that the judge makes, they will be referring to different perspectives in order to justify the sentence.”

He added: “The range of sentencing [for manslaughter] is also extremely wide – manslaughter has a discretionary life sentence, as opposed to the mandatory life sentence for murder, and can range from conditional discharge to life in prison, which is a huge range for judicial discretion.

“In this particular case, the Philpott case, you can see that the judge has taken the highest possible sentence for manslaughter.”

You can hear the interview in full here.

Dr Howard Davis talks about Abu Qatada legal case on BBC Radio Solent

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Dr Howard Davis, Reader in Law at BU, was interviewed on BBC Radio Solent about the government losing an appeal against a ruling preventing the deportation of preacher Abu Qatada.

Howard specialises in public law, and particularly the impact of the Human Rights Act on UK law, and told Drivetime presenter Steve Harris: “Home secretaries have the power to deport people if they think it is not in the public interest for those people to stay in the UK.

“In the good old days, the police would literally come along at 6am and whip you off and you’d be deported and there’d be very little you could do about it.”

But, he added, that there was now a special court commission to deal with cases and that:”It’s an absolute fundamental rule of human rights law that you cannot deport someone to a country where they would have a real risk of being tortured or a real risk that evidence obtained by torture would be used against them.”

He said that Britain’s hands were tied in the matter by a ruling from the European Court of Human Rights, but said that they could get around it if they had sufficient diplomatic assurances from Jordanian government about the treatment of Abu Qatada if he were deported there.

“What the recent case has been about is whether those assurances are sufficiently strong and robust, and whether they show that the other evidence that Jordan does engage in torture is not so strong.”

Howard said that the Home Secretary could now appeal to the Supreme Court, but is not likely to be successful because the actual point of law isn’t in dispute.

“What’s in dispute here is the credibility of these diplomatic assurances about the treatment of Abu Qatada and whether he’d get a fair trial.”

He added: “In the end, the legal process may come to a halt, and we must not forget that the ban on torture and the use of torture evidence in trials is probably the most fundamental rule of law that we have.”

You can listen to the full interview here

Dr David McQueen talks about class on BBC Radio Solent

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BU Politics and Media course leader Dr David McQueen was on BBC Radio Solent talking about class, and how people define what class they are in.

He spoke about the issue on Alex Dyke’s mid-morning show, following a survey which showed that people without an above average salary identified themselves as middle-class.

“The fact is that survey has generated a lot of interest, I think because the British are obsessed with class, basically,” he said.

“I think there’s a mirror image of America, which denies there’s a class system, I think we obsess on the tiny details of class.”

He added: “I think people used to be more comfortable in their class – I think if you go back to 1966, what’s interesting is that only a third of people identified themselves as middle-class. That’s now leapt up to 50 per cent according to this survey, and other surveys have shown it to be up to 70 per cent.

“So I think there’s a real anxiety about representing yourself as working class.”

But he said that the results may be skewed as people have to tick a box identifying themselves as one or the other.

“I think that most people feel uncomfortable with either of those definitions – there’s parts of their identities which don’t fit in with either.

“But what’s also interesting is that the family background continues to be important; if you are born into a family which has money, that you are likely to inherit the wealth and values of that family, and I think that’s come across in this survey – that they value education, that they think the type of home they live in is important, and their income as being important.”

He added that, increasingly, social mobility was being stifled and it was becoming more difficult for people to change the class that they are in.

“I think the real issues here is that people’s salaries are falling, and that people want to identify themselves as not being poor, and as not working class, when actually, by objective standards, they are.”

You can listen to the full interview here

Dr Andy Johnson talks chewing gum and concentration on The Today Programme

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Psychology lecturer Dr Andy Johnson spoke on BBC Radio 4’s Today Programme about his research into chewing gum and concentration.

Andy was part of a team of researchers who found that chewing gum can help people focus better while doing tasks.

“In this study our participants undertook a very monotonous and repetitive constant vigilance task, where participants were presented with a sequence of digits and they were looking out for a particular signal,” he told presenter James Naughtie.

He added that participants who chewed gum had less of a decrease in performance throughout the task, and reported being significantly more alert.

He said: “So what we suggest is that chewing gum can facilitate vigilance during a monotonous task but that this is only found when performance has dropped to sub-optimal level, so when it starts to fall down that’s when gum has some scope for having a benefit.

“But if we are at our normal operating levels, we are sort of at ceiling effect, so there is nowhere for cognition to go. So only once our performance begins to drop does gum introduce a benefit in performance and vigilance.”

Dr Johnson, who worked on the study with researchers from Cardiff University, explained that chewing increases blood flow to the brain and that increases delivery of glucose and oxygenated blood to the parts of the brain that are doing the task.

He was also interviewed on BBC Radio Solent’s Breakfast Show, local station Wave 105 and BBC Radio Scotland about the research, which appears in the British Journal of Psychology.

You can listen to Dr Andy Johnson on the Today Programme here for the next seven days.

The Rock ‘rocks’ with media appearances

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The community edition of The Rock, a newspaper created, edited and written by Bournemouth University students, has been a big hit with local and national media.

The student run newspaper, labelled by the BBC website as an edition printed ‘to improve relations with local residents’, has been widely praised in the media as it has been spoken about on Fire Radio, BBC Radio Solent and on the BBC’s main news pages.

Speaking to the BBC, Julia Denni, editor–in–chief and founder of the paper in her first year at University, said, “We really hope the newspaper will shed a new light that we are a part of the community, that it’s not all negative, and that we do a lot of great things. We want to work hand–in–hand with residents because we belong to the community too.”

Julia continued, “Gone are the days when student newspapers were full of gossip and adolescent humour.

“This is a proper newspaper with responsible journalism. It’s vital for students to be a part of the community and engage in the town where they live for up to three years.”

The newspaper continues to be written by BU students and distributed on Bournemouth University’s campuses.

To read the BBC news story in full you can visit the BBC website.

Sean Beer returns to talk horsemeat on BBC Radio Solent

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Sean Beer, Senior Lecturer within the School of Tourism, specialising in the food supply chain, was invited back on to Steve Harris’ Drive show on BBC Radio Solent to talk about the worsening horsemeat scandal.

During Sean’s second appearance on the show he discussed the complicated nature of our food supply chain and how easy it was for the chain to be corrupted. He said, “You are dealing with a very complicated, long supply which is a bit like a sausage with lots of holes in it, and if you put pressure on that sausage the meat just squeezes out of all the holes. We have put a lot of financial pressure on this supply chain and sometimes we get what we pay for!”

When asked if he was surprised that the scandal was continuing he said, “I am not surprised at all. I was a bit surprised that it was horse that came to the fore. It could have been contamination with chicken, lamb or halal slaughtered meat that wasn’t halal or it could even have been a pesticide.”

As the discussion concluded, Sean finished by saying, “It’s not really about horse as many people eat horse around the world. What it is about is trust and the fact that what it says on the label is what we should expect.”